Disaster, influenza, lunatic: the sky is hiding in your words

English is full of fossils from a time when the sky was thought to steer life on the ground. Most of them are still in daily use, and almost nobody hears the stars in them any more.

A bad star

“Disaster” came into English in the late 1500s from the Italian disastro: dis-, a sense of something gone wrong, and astro, star. A disaster was an event under an ill-placed star. Shakespeare plays on it in King Lear, where Edmund mocks people who “make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars.” The same stage gave the world Romeo and Juliet, “a pair of star-cross’d lovers.”

A disaster was, literally, an event under an ill-placed star.

An influence from above

“Influenza” is the Italian word for influence, from the medieval Latin influentia, a flowing-in. Physicians described the power of the heavens as streaming down onto the earth, and epidemics that struck many people at once were put down to it. English borrowed the Italian name for the great epidemic of 1743, and the word for the illness stayed.

Moonstruck

“Lunatic” is the Latin lunaticus, moonstruck, from luna. Madness was long believed to wax and wane with the Moon’s phases, and English law used “lunatic” as a legal category well into the twentieth century.

Born under a planet

Temperament words come from the same source. Someone “jovial” was born under Jupiter (Jove) and expected to be good-humoured; someone “saturnine” under slow, cold Saturn; someone “mercurial” under quick, changeable Mercury; and “martial” things belong to Mars. “Ill-starred” and “thank your lucky stars” say the rest plainly.

Two more are often listed and are less certain. “Consider” comes from the Latin considerare, which some scholars read as “to examine the stars” (sidus, star); others disagree. “Desire,” from desiderare, has a similar disputed story. Either way, the habit of looking up before deciding left its mark on how we talk about deciding.